The article is written by Sherwood MacVeigh, Director, Senior Brand Strategist Hyperquake

My relationship with my eye cream is over.

I loved my eye cream; I used it faithfully for years, every morning and night. But those days are history; I am breaking up with my brand. To paraphrase a country superstar’s current hit song, my brand and I “are never, ever getting back together.” Why?  This brand just isn’t working for me anymore. I’ve changed; it hasn’t.

The article is written by Greg Taylor, Director of Brand Provocation at Elmwood, London

It’s that time of year again here in the UK. Our TV screens are being hit with a blizzard of yuletide advertising. The retailers in particular vie for bragging rights as to who has the best ‘Christmas campaign’. This time around, Waitrose and John Lewis particularly struck me. For international readers, Waitrose is the chain of supermarkets of the John Lewis Partnership, which also has a chain of department stores called, you guessed it, ‘John Lewis’. 

As the new 2013 year approaches, JWT, one of the biggest global marketing comms agencies, has recently released its newest 8th trend report for 2013 —a 171-page white paper, encompassing the results of a year-long quantitative, qualitative and desk research conducted by JWTIntelligence in the U.S and U.K. Additionally, 70 JWT experts across more than 25 international markets were interviewed about technology, health and wellness, retail, media and science.

From persuasion to platform, from positioning to purpose, from consistency to experimentation, from control to liberation and from ownership to ‘boundarylessness’ — these are the crucial shifts in branding theory spotted over the 20-year career by Robert Jones, head of new thinking at a brand and innovation firm Wolff Olins and visiting professor at UEA, published in the current issue of the Journal of Brand Management.

Doodle 4 Google, an international creative contest for young artists to create their own Google doodles, this year was hosted in Russia for the first time. While the company’s headquarter chose a futuristic topic for the 2012 event («If I could travel in time, I’d visit…»), Google Russia gave the contest a rather patriotic twist having devoted it to the Russian authentic culture and history («My city. My country»). As it was announced yesterday, Pyotr Alekseyev, an 8-year-old schoolboy from Belgorod, named the winner.